WEBVTT

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It's a great pleasure to be
back here in what I always

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think of as desert country.

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I came here first
about, well, at least--

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either, but 40 or 50 years ago.

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At my age, one becomes a
little vague about time.

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I used to come down here
and camp in the desert

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when the flowers were out and
listen to the doves at night.

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It was a little hard
sleeping on the ground,

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but it was very beautiful.

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I think you need to get
a little bit closer.

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Think that'll work.

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T. S. Eliot once said that the
reading of one's own poetry

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was a form of indecent exposure
and I know what he means.

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And another nice--

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I like epigraphs, you know?

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You don't just get the
motor going right away.

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I sent some of my poems not
long ago to a young lady editor,

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one of the various magazines.

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And she wrote back and she said
that my poems and their content

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was not what she had been
taught to expect in poetry,

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and I hope she was right.

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I might say a little bit.

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I don't really write poems.

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I write light verse.

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I aspire no higher.

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By light verse, I mean
funny poems, satiric poems,

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love stuff, even
obscene love stuff--

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though I won't bore
you with any of that--

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and that type of thing.

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[INAUDIBLE] playing with words.

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It's a tradition that has a
certain background that goes

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back to the Greek Anthology.

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It comes up through
Catullus, whom I never

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could consider anything but
a light verse and a poet,

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though he was a very great
light verse or a poet, perhaps

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the greatest,
Martial and Juvenal.

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They're a number of French
and Italian ones and Rochester

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and Herrick.

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And in modern times, the comic
poems of Pound and Eliot.

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I'm thinking of the hippopotamus
poems, which are really superb.

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I use a very peculiar
metric, which I think

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is in tune with modern times.

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It's the typewriter metric.

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You set your typewriter for a
certain number of characters

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and then when you
come to that time,

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you stop and you're
allowed to-- in my system,

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you're allowed to break
the word with a hyphen

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as long as you
hyphenate it by Webster.

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And the next line
then in the couplet

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may only be two characters this
way or two characters that way.

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Now, the virtue
of this method is

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that you don't have
to worry about where

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to end your lines because
the typewriter tells you.

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And you just run your spoken
cadence against the machine

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and it has some
interesting effects

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when you read it in the book.

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I will read the
first poem called

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Technical Notes, first
Technical Notes, which

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explains what I'm up to.

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Catullus is my master,
and I mix a little acid

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in a bit of honey in his bowl.

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Love is my subject and the lack
of love, which lack is what

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makes evil a poet must strike.

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Catullus could rub
words so hard together.

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Their friction
burn the heat that

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warms us now 2000 years away.

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I roll the words around my
mouth and count the letters

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in each line.

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Thus, eye and ear
contend inside the poem

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and draw its movement tight.

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Milton thought rhyme was vulgar.

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I agree.

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Yet sometimes if it's
hidden in the line,

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a rhyme will rich in tone.

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The thing I most despise is,
quote, "poetic," unquote,

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diction.

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I prefer to build with plain
brown bricks of common talk,

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American talk, and then set
one Roman stone among them

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for a key.

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I know Catullus knew a poem is
like a blow, an impact striking

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where you least expect.

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This I believe.

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And yet with me, a poem is
finally just a natural thing.

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